Child First Clinician

Job description

The Child First Clinician partners with a Family Support Partner to engage families who are referred to the Child First home-based intervention. Child First’s primary goal is to strengthen the caregiver-child relationship so that it serves both as a protective buffer to unavoidable stress and directly facilitates the child’s emotional, language, and cognitive growth.  The Clinician uses trauma-informed CPP, a relationship-based, dyadic, parent-child treatment model, which focuses on the primary attachment relationships of the young child.  The Clinician engages with both the caregiver and child in a supportive, reflective, and exploratory manner which fosters a protective, nurturing, and responsive parent-child relationship.  The Clinician’s therapeutic intervention focuses on: 1) helping caregivers understand typical developmental challenges and expectations; 2) increasing caregivers’ ability to reflect on the meaning and feelings motivating a child’s behavior; 3) supporting caregivers’ problem solving; and 4) helping caregivers understand the psychodynamic relationship between parental feelings, history, and the caregiver response to the child. The Clinician also provides consultation to teachers in early care and education settings, as needed.

Essential Duties/Responsibilities
Engage with the Child First family and the Family Support Partner in the collaborative family assessment process (i.e., gather information from interviews, observations of interactions and play, reviewed records, collateral sources, and standardized measures).
Use all available information to develop a thoughtful, well-integrated clinical formulation and Child and Family Plan of Care, in partnership with the Family Support Partner and family.
Provide Child First home-based psychotherapeutic intervention with young children and their caregivers using relational, dyadic psychotherapy (CPP) and other modalities.
Help the caregiver gain insight regarding personal history (including trauma history), feelings for the child, and current parenting practices.
Avert crisis situations by assisting the family in times of urgent need (e.g., risk of harm to child or caregiver, pending child removal), in consultation with the Family Support Partner and Clinical Supervisor.
Provide mental health and developmental assessment and consultation within early care and education settings and to other early childhood providers.
Embrace use of videotaping to enhance both therapeutic work with families and reflective supervision. 
Engage in weekly individual, Team, and group reflective clinical supervision with Clinical Supervisor.
Engage actively in all aspects of the Child First Learning Collaborative, including in-person trainings, distance learning curriculum, and specialty trainings.
Keep all appropriate documentation for clinical accountability and reimbursement.
Participate in other clinical and administrative activities as appropriate.
Other duties as assigned.

If interested, please apply on our Careers site: Sign up or sign in for contact information

• Enjoy what you do and where you work!
• Full-time, In-Person Position
• Sign-On Bonus: $3,000 ($1,500 paid at 6 months of service and $1,500 paid at 12 months of service).